The Biola Years Vol. 3

Eric, Jeff and myself lived in a dorm called Stewart. Stewart was one of the older dorms and had many traditions; traditions that were forced upon unwitting students like myself that just wanted to be left alone. Under the pretense of “bonding”, many floors did things at the beginning of each year that were usually dumb or disgusting. The floor called “Lemonheads” would eat whole lemons, the floor HoM would chug milk and throw up, the dorm as a whole would participate in the “kilt run” where they ran around campus once a year in boxers.

I did none of these things, and I’m a better person for it.

My first year in Stewart was 2001, a watershed year in cinema as “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” was released. Our floor had been re-named “The Shire” in honor of it. The best way to describe our floor is to use a quote from Old Ben Kenobi, “The Shire: You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious”. It was as if Biola had intentionally taken all the sarcastic, cynical, best people and hid them on our floor. We started some illegal poker nights, at least twice a week we’d be playing cards. Those nights would evolve into biannual no limit hold’em poker tournaments, with hundreds of dollars at stake. If we weren’t playing cards, we were in Hollywood going to Amoeba Records and Roscoe’s House of Chicken N Waffles. Or at the Troubador to see Hopesfall, Coheed And Cambria, From Autumn To Ashes, Thrice, any of a plethora of bands. And if we weren’t at any of those places, you would find us at our computers playing Starcraft and Diablo 2 for hours upon hours on end. Going to Taco Bell at 1am, buying 20 tacos and eating them all while watching “Shanghai Noon”… always “Shanghai Noon”. This was our bonding time, relationships that I still hold dear, made through the non-sanctioned events and practices of Biola. Homework was done somewhere in there too, I think.

More about Stewart tomorrow.